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SpaceX Falcon Rocket Nails 2nd Ocean Landing

A SpaceX rocket touched down on a landing pad floating in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday despite plunging through the atmosphere twice as fast as the rocket that made the company’s first ocean landing last month.

A SpaceX rocket touched down on a landing pad floating in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday despite plunging through the atmosphere twice as fast as the rocket that made the company's first ocean landing last month.

The rocket flying Friday lofted a five-ton TV broadcasting satellite toward an orbit more than 20,000 miles higher than where the International Space Station flies. During the last Falcon 9 mission in April, the rocket dispatched a cargo ship to the station, which flies about 250 miles above Earth.

"Rocket re-entry is a lot faster and hotter than last time, so odds of making it are maybe even, but we should learn a lot either way," SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk wrote on Twitter before the touchdown.

"Whohoo!!" Musk wrote minutes later as a live webcast showed the rocket, its four landing legs deployed, settling itself on the ocean platform stationed about 400 miles east of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Friday's successful landing marks the third time SpaceX has returned a rocket intact after a mission. In December, a Falcon rocket touched down on a landing pad on the ground at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

SpaceX plans to test-fire the rocket that flew back in April, and if all goes well re-launch it later this year, possibly with a paying customer's satellite aboard, Musk told reporters last month. The first rocket to land will be displayed at the company's Hawthorne, California, headquarters.

With Friday's successful launch, SpaceX intends to ramp up its flight rate, with missions expected about every three weeks. The company has more than 70 launches on its schedule, worth more than $10 billion.

A repaired and upgraded Falcon 9 rocket not only put SpaceX back in the launch business on Monday, it stunningly demonstrated that with enough time, technical expertise and maybe a little luck, it’s possible to return a rocket booster to the launch site. Here’s a look back at the highs and lows along the way to this historic moment.

SpaceX pulled off an historic first Monday night, launching a network of communications satellites into orbit, and then landing the rocket’s jettisoned main stage back near the launch site. SpaceX gave its customer, Orbcomm, a cut-rate $47 million, two-flight deal, a savings for more than $70 million. Orbcomm, which operates machine-to-machine communications systems, such as between shipping containers and retailers, was an early SpaceX adopter, booking rides on the company’s now-decommissioned Falcon 1 launcher. SpaceX moved Orbcomm to its bigger Falcon 9 rockets for the same price. Landing the booster was the icing on the cake, an experiment conducted at SpaceX’s expense. The touchdown, however, may lead to even better prices for Orbcomm and SpaceX’s other customers in the future, with a new category of launch vehicle in the offing slightly used.

SpaceX founder and chief executive had a nasty surprise on his 44th birthday: a Falcon 9 rocket blasting off to deliver a load of cargo to the International Space Station broke apart about two minutes after liftoff from Florida on June 28. It was the first failure of the Falcon 9, which had flown 18 times previously. The accident, which was caused by a faulty strut in the rocket’s upper-stage liquid oxygen tank, kept the Falcon 9 fleet grounded for six months.

Following a series of tests to control booster descent, SpaceX customized a pair of ocean platforms in hopes of bringing a Falcon 9 first-stage back intact, a key step in the company’s quest to develop a reusable launcher, one that could fly for a fraction of today’s going rate. Nailing the landing was “like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a windstorm,” SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said at the time. During the first attempt to land at sea, in January 2015, the booster hit the target, but landed too hard, primarily because the hydraulic system needed to operate stabilizing grid fins, ran out of fluid. The next attempt, in April, a stuck valve prevented the booster from reacting fast enough to maintain position after a successful touchdown. It toppled over and exploded.

SpaceX’s early attempts to develop rocket landing technologies included a suborbital testbed called Grasshopper, which was used for low-altitude, low-speed hover and landing tests beginning in September 2012. On its eighth and final flight in October 2013, Grasshopper flew to an altitude of 2,441 feet and landed. A follow-on program, the Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicle, or F9R, had a successful debut in April 2014, but crashed due to a faulty sensor four months later.

One of the first to offer congratulations to Elon Musk and SpaceX for nailing a rocket landing was Jeff Bezos, fellow billionaire rocketeer who founded his own space company, Blue Origin, in 2000, a couple of years before Musk started SpaceX. “Welcome to the club!” Bezos posted on Twitter, a not-so-oblique reference to his company nailing a landing of its suborbital New Shepard rocket a month ago. After that feat, Musk took to Twitter to offer his own congratulations, also couched with comments about the relative difficulty of landing from orbital versus suborbital velocities. Rocket races, anyone?

Cheap, reusable rockets aren’t just good for business. SpaceX founder Elon Musk sees them as an essential part of the technology needed to get to Mars. “Now is the first time in the history of Earth ... where it's possible for us to extend life to other planets," Musk said at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco this month. "That window may be open for a long time -- and hopefully it is -- but it also may be open for a short time," he said. “The wise move is to make life multi-planetary while we can.”
A large part of making space travel affordable is reducing launch costs, hence SpaceX’s steadfast efforts to develop reusable rockets. Musk said each Falcon 9 costs about $16 million to build, but fuel for the flight is a relatively cheap $200,000. Slashing costs by that much is a game-changer. SpaceX’s next job will be to assess the condition of the recovered Falcon and then possibly fly it again.